Cultural Spaces and Design

Cultural Spaces and Design – Prospects of Design Education

Cultural Spaces and Design – Prospects of Design Education is a project situated in the field of Applied Intercultural Design Research. It focuses on the impact of the processes of globalisation on design and examines their consequences for Design Education. Being carried out in international collaboration with lecturers and students from other universities as well as representatives from design practice, the project aims to develop, test, and evaluate model education contents. For this purpose, tools and methods for dealing with different design cultures will be developed, translated into course modules and integrated into Design Education. The course modules will then be tested at HGK Basel (Academy of Art and Design), Switzerland.

What is special about this project?

As in other fields, in Design Education, new approaches, products and prospects result, above all, from cultural exchange and mobility. Until now, however, intercultural student experience has not been made the subject of education and teaching, an omission which conflicts with the more and more common practice to internationalise design teams that is coming with globalisation. In other words, it is high time to start tackling the challenges connected with e.g. such team building strategies while students are still at university. For the students, the central questions in this context concern new ways and objectives of design in the age of globalisation, i.e. what matters here is a lot more than the acquisition of useful organisational skills, applied when carrying out an international project: what is at stake here are the criteria of a type of design practice that promotes cultural diversity instead of serving the doctrine d'unité of Global Design.

At a glance: course of the project

2014

Expanding the network / concept elaboration: introductory workshop carried out by the project team at the Centre for European Studies at the College of Arts & Social Sciences in Canberra (Australia National University – ANU). Preparation of group work activities.

2015-2016

Group work activities in different countries attended by design students from different nationalities. These activities run internationally or in Switzerland and are instructed partly by our project team and partly by lecturers form our partner network.

2016-2017

International colloquium aimed at evaluating the research done and drafting the main aspects relevant to Design Education. Concluding event, resume and definitive evaluation of the research work; formulation of educational objectives and contents. Implementation of the developed course modules; publication (target groups: design students, lecturers, designers, and the relevant levels of education politics).